Friday, September 21, 2012

Unfortunately, Microsoft does not support performing an in-place upgrade of a Windows 7 Ultimate installation to a Windows 8 Enterprise edition; Windows 7 Ultimate can only be upgraded to Windows 8 Professional (since Windows 8 does not come with an Ultimate edition). True, there might be little added value for a home user in Windows 8 Enterprise, but since it was the only version I had ready on a bootable USB stick, I tried to fool the installer to continue anyway.

This was surprisingly easy. It suffices to modify the "EditionID" and "ProductName" registry keys in the following location:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version

from "Ultimate" and "Windows 7 Ultimate" to "Enterprise" and "Windows 7 Enterprise" respectively, to let the installation proceed.

About Me

I work at an IT company called ThingTank, a subsidiary of the Xylos group. We focus primarily on Internet-of-Thing solutions combined with Artificial Intelligence (predictive analytics). My focus as a technology architect is constructing IoT solutions for our customers, with a personal focus on the devices - both the micro electronics and the programming - and the analytics - mostly predictive analytics using R or Python.